The secretary of the National Platform, Mr Anthony Coughlan, has claimed that No votes were lost by Sinn Féin in the Nice Treaty referendum because of the party's failure to exploit the immigration issue.
In an open letter to the party's Dublin South West TD, Mr Sean Crowe, Mr Coughlan said: "I am confident that if Sinn Féin in particular had adopted a more critical attitude to the Government's 'own goal' in agreeing to a different immigration policy for Ireland from most other EU states, it could have increased the No vote further in working-class communities."
While he said he doubted it would have altered the overall result, he said that Sinn Féin's support for a "unified, cohesive" stance on immigration would have been beneficial.
"In the Nice Two referendum, concern about the effect of the Government's unequal and imbalanced open-door policy on immigration from Eastern Europe undoubtedly contributed to the overall No vote," Mr Coughlan said.
Addressing Mr Crowe specifically, he added: "There is nothing progressive or radical about an open-door immigration policy, as your own working-class constituents in South West Dublin will be well able to tell you. They are the people whose wage-rates may be undermined and whose public services may further deteriorate in the absence of a sensible migration policy. It is only a conceit of the comfortable and socially privileged in these politically correct times to try to pretend otherwise."
Mr Crowe said he did not wish to get into "a slagging match" with Mr Coughlan, for whom he had the "height of respect" for work he had done down the years.
However, he said, Mr Coughlan "is wrong on this issue. Immigration was not an issue in the referendum, and clearly the race card should not be used in any circumstances whatsoever".
Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr Coughlan said he did not want his comments to be seen as a criticism of Sinn Féin.
Rather, he said, he was expressing regret that he did not make more of an effort to try to persuade Sinn Féin and the Green Party to support his view.
This, he said, he wished he had done before the parties had made "an ultra-politically correct knee-jerk response that played into the hands of the Government and its allies, and helped to unleash the scurrilous misrepresentations of Minister Dick Roche, Pronsias de Rossa, and others".
